I set out to geek the heck out of Toronto’s hippest geeks, and I did.
I showed them Emacs as they’d never seen it before—and even that was
a tiny fraction of my config. Lots of cool stuff behind the scenes,
too. When I showed them M-x doctor (the Emacs psychotherapist),
someone shouted out, “Is Emacs talking to you?” I laughed and
continued. What I *really* should’ve done was break the sequence of my
presentation, hook up the speakers, and tell them about Emacspeak –
presentation sequence be darned. ;) Oh, if they only knew how easy it
was to make jokes reality under Emacs! I remember writing my ‘bot
implants’ – the hippie-expand code I used to answer questions really
really quickly on IRC…

Anyway. That was FUN. And it was relatively easy to get through,
especially with the cue system I made (Emacspeak rocks!). I’ll talk
about that some other time. It’s a really cool hack and well worth exploring.

SO. The democamp.ca folks will eventually get
around to posting a vidcast. In the meantime, I have a 431MB MPEG
movie that I need to either downsample or cut up in order to put
online, maybe on YouTube. I don’t have
enough memory or hard disk space to play around with this (have you
seen my computer?!), but I’ll happily put the video up if we can
figure out how to go about doing that.

If you enjoyed the talk, missed it, or just want to hear/see me bounce
up and down about Emacs some more, come to the Linux Caffe
on Saturday (Oct 28, 2006) from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM. I’ll be there,
and we might even see about having some kind of mini-show / vidcast. I wonder if
David has a projector. =)

Kudos to the presenter for structuring the presentation for quick and early audience participation, and for taking on the challenge of writing something in realtime! =) He’s doing a quick tic-tac-toe game with the help of some PHP code he prepared before and a framework called PBJ, which isn’t linked on the Democamp site and is near-impossible to search for.

Look at that, programming with maybe a hundred people in the
audience catching missing parens and stuff like that. =)

Smalltalk is a fun language. I ran into it when a friend told me about
Squeak, which is this *totally* awesome little 3D Smalltalk
environment which you should try if only so that it can warp your
brain.

I would do more Smalltalk, but Squeak is not fun to use when you don’t
really have a mouse. =) Maybe when I get a proper computer.

Quotiki has live search for quotes, which would be good if it was more
responsive. For example, the search “caesar” just shows the results
for “ca” even after a while. Tagging and bookmarking is great, of
course, and if I can get a fortune file or RSS for my favorite quotes
(there *must* be an RSS feed for this and all the other views), then
that would be fun to pull into my blog.

Hmm. They’ve got some kind of hyperlinking going on when you hover
over the quote, which may make it difficult to copy the text.

A podcast of quotes, too. Hmm. It’s nice to go into the history of
these quotes. =)